The simple phrase ‘as soon as’, which your middle-school English teacher told you is a subordinating conjunction and you are still figuring out who was subordinate to who, appears 28 times in our Constitution—eight times followed by ‘possible’ and 20 times by ‘may be’.
Forget your English teacher and her Wren & Martin; let’s get constitutional. There are times when the Constitution is simpler to explain than is English grammar. What I meant was: the phrase ‘as soon as possible’ appears eight times in the Constitution; ‘as soon as may be’ appears 20 times. Examples? Here they go.
Article 68(2) says, “An election to fill a vacancy in the office of vice president occurring by reason of his death, resignation or removal, or otherwise shall be held as soon as possible after the occurrence of the vacancy....”
Article 93 says, “The House of the People shall, as soon as may be, choose two members of the house to be respectively speaker and deputy speaker thereof....”
To you and me, both phrases mean the same for all practical purposes, and are even interchangeable, just as ‘as soon as’ and ‘no sooner than’ are. (Remember the number of times you had to convert sentences with ‘as soon as’ into lines with ‘no sooner than’ in your exercise book, and got pulled up for placing ‘than’ in the wrong place?)
But the government knows grammar and the Constitution better; that ‘as soon as possible’ emphasises immediacy and prompt action, whereas ‘as soon as may be’ requires diligent and responsible execution within a reasonable time frame. That much has been explained, not by Wren & Martin, F.T. Wood or H.W. Fowler, but by the Supreme Court through several judgments.
Now let’s look at how the rulers are following both. The vice presidency fell vacant last week. Following Article 68(2) in Devnagari letter and atmanirbhar spirit, the government is moving with alacrity to get it filled. Good job!
But in the case of the vacancy in the post of the deputy speaker of the Lok Sabha, the rulers are giving a liberal interpretation to ‘as soon as may be’ mentioned in Article 93. So liberal that ‘as soon as may be’ has now stretched to six years and more. The 17th Lok Sabha ran its full course without a deputy speaker; it looks like the 18th will follow suit.
That’s fine. Let the rulers decide how soon is ‘as soon as may be’.
But there are two other instances where they are treating ‘as soon as possible’ as casually as ‘as soon as may be’.
One is in Article 200. It says, if a governor wants his legislature to reconsider any non-money bill, he may return it to the house “as soon as possible after the presentation to him... for assent”. Several governors have been interpreting this ‘as soon as possible’ just like the Centre has been reading the ‘as soon as may be’ in the case of the deputy speaker election. So much so, an irritated M.K. Stalin of Tamil Nadu went to court and got the judges to give a three-month deadline to governors to sign or send back a bill. Now the Centre has gone back to court with a presidential reference seeking clarifications.
The fourth ‘as soon as’ pertains to a court order itself. While upholding the scrapping of Article 370 which had given a special status to Jammu and Kashmir, the judges had also directed that “restoration of statehood shall take place at the earliest and as soon as possible”. It has been one and a half years now, and the people of Jammu and Kashmir are waiting to know how soon is ‘as soon as’.
Honourable judges and learned grammarians! Can you help?
prasannan@theweek.in